Entries tagged with fanfic

Okay, sorry I've been so totally out of contact. I'm mostly on my Tumblr right now because my fandom is most active there, as much as I'd rather it be here or on LJ.

But anyway. We (titianArchivist and myself) have completed the first "book" of Wires and Stars, our Sollux/Psiioniic epicfic, and I have all these rambly thoughts to tell you sometime about creativity and how awesome it is to have a creative partner because this is the only novel-length work I've both completed and been genuinely happy with completing (same for Titian), and it's making me think about the possibility of going back towards writing as a career.

The series isn't finished, but the first part is finally out the gate. All seventeen chapters of it. WITH FANART ALL OVER THE PLACE, oh my god. Not by us, but by people who actually draw, wow.

Story contains pseudo-incest [of the "characters are genetically related but don't have a human-style family relationship" variety], body horror, angst, hurt/comfort, age difference, mental health issues... let's just say our motto is "everything is beautiful and everything hurts", and we're dedicated to both dealing with really dark material and being ultimately kind to our readers as a baseline. It's an attempt to tell an ultimately hopeful story in a crapsack world.

We have an authorial policy, in response to a number of concerned questions: ask directly for spoilers if you need them. Fanfiction should be fun! It should be fun for everyone, at every level of narrative surprise comfort or lack thereof!

If you want to skip to the smut, we also wrote fingers of light, a 12k smutty one-shot that takes place just before the last chapter of Initiation. It's somewhat spoilery for the story arc of Initiation, but if you're a skip-to-the-smut sort of person (no shame in that!) you probably don't mind.

Still need to write up the FAQ of "things you need to know about Homestuck to make our fic comprehensible if you're not a Homestuck reader", but as a general principle, most of them are the sort of thing you'll know if someone has told you about Homestuck at length and if you keep the wiki handy: we're trying very hard with this to make it relatively accessible to non-Homestuck fans. And, if you're a non-Homestuck who wants to read it and is waiting on said FAQ, please let me know! It'll give me motivation to work harder. :-)

Summary/teaser: You crawl back into your command centers through a narrow sideways channel of machine code, back to your body where she wants you: your body the central emplacement on the front line from which you can never retreat.

Now that we're actually headed toward the central pairing of the story, I thought some readers might like a bit of background noise on some of the issues and how we're addressing them, since this is LONGfic and not a one-off. So, this is gonna be a FAQ/IAQ - reader questions and our own questions that we answer in process, updated as the story goes.

We're also going to address some Homestuck stuff here for any readers who are new to the fandom, as time goes on, and detail headcanons for bits and pieces that come up. Let's start off with a few pragmatic questions about titling and formatting:

Q. Why is this set up as a series on AO3? How much of it will there be?

A. We have at least two main acts of story, as well as an interlude, planned. The story begins concurrent and more-or-less compatible with Homestuck canon for Hivebent (though see disclaimers about character ages, below) and will break away at a specific and obvious point.

Q. Where do the chapter titles come from?

A. They're song lyrics, from specific songs that we've selected for the soundtrack because most-to-all of the lyrics will have significance in the story. We encourage readers to go read the lyrics and/or get hold of the songs and speculate.

A. For reference we're using the headcanon that one Alternian solar sweep = approximately 2.6 years, for maturity purposes if not chronological purposes. So 5 sweeps = about 13 years and 6 sweeps = nearly 16.

This is based on canonical characterizations: troll maturity doesn't seem to correspond to human assumptions very well - which is no big surprise given that they're as much guardians over their lusii as vice versa. Everyone has a lot more irons in the fire than we'd expect for 13-year-olds, going into SGRUB. So we just picked a slightly more sensible-seeming time conversion and we're going with that.

First chapter of the Sollux/Psiioniic fic we've been working on. (Additionally Sollux/Aradia pale - which is the most major pairing in this chapter, and there will be some Sollux/Karkat, and more pairings added as they appear. The central pairing isn't quite even a pairing yet; but since it's the central pairing I figured it deserved to be tagged for clarity.)

The first time, you just dream of strange stars. Stars rise at the top of your vision and arc lazily down to the bottom, constellation after constellation, galaxy after galaxy, and you wake with an effortless sense of great distance and deep calm that stays with you half the night.

Perigees pass before you’re willing to question it, to investigate what the hell that was all about, and by that time, things have gotten entirely out of hand.

You’re well aware that you’re half crazy. Maybe it’s just your mutant thinkpan acting up. The alternative... you don’t want to think about the alternative.

WARNINGS: So far? Body horror. A bit of ableist language surrounding mental illness, because Karkat takes potshots at Sollux and Sollux takes potshots at himself. The rest at AO3. There will be smut later, don't you worry about it.